I posted a similiar topic a few days ago with the same issue. I tried a new installation technique where I used Vista to format my 2 GB USB flash drive to FAT32 and used Win32 Syslinux to add a MBR. The Puppy installation worked great but when I shutdown Puppy 4 it immediately goes to Session Not Saved. I have tried the ComboFormat method with the identical results.

After reading the comment of the thread initiator I downloaded Puppy 3.01 and installed on my 2 GB USB flash drive. It worked perfectly and after the first shutdown it walked through a procedure to create a save file.

Nothing wrong with Puppy 4.00. I just did a frugal install onto the hard drive. On first reboot it asked to create the pup_save.2fs file and it put it into the /pup400 folder.

I had to follow the instructions in the 4.0 manual found on the website. Getting Grub set-up was a little rough, but the iinstructions are good.

Dig out the manual and try er agin

Thanks. The manual suggests to create a directory /puppy400 and put the 4 files in it and write the grub/menu.lst line as follows:
title Puppy Linux 4.00 frugal
rootnoverify (hd0,X)
kernel /puppy400/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=puppy400
initrd /puppy400/initrd.gz

It works.

When I shutdown/reboot for the first time Puppy asks to save to the file or use entire partition. Initially, I selected the entire partition since it is a dedicated partition to Puppy. Although, Puppy added some folders to the partition (etc initrd lib root usr) it failed to create pup_save.2fs file and the configurations were not saved.

Second time I selected the option save to the file and it saved in /puppy400 folder.

The option to use the entire partition seems to be new but it is not working to save configurations. Why?

Thanks for the suggestion regarding the manual. The installer for a USB flashdrive uses Syslinux as the bootloader and creates a virtual ext2 file within the FAT32 partition. I don't see any mention of this in the manual and was never asked by the installer whether I wanted to save to a file or a partition.

if you boot Windows too, you also would want to put this in the menu.lst file:

title Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

you can install Grub by copying the files in /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc to the /boot/grub directory ... /boot/grub will probably be in /mnt/home ... you actually only need the stage1 and stage2 files, and the stage1_5 file for the file system that /boot/grub is on ... but you might as well copy them all ... though stage2_eltorito is definitely not needed

now, to actually install the Grub boot loader to the mbr (first sector of the hard drive) you would type this in an rxvt console window:

grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit

Grub (Grand Unified Boot loader) should now be installed and configured

so basically, to install Puppy to the hard drive, you copy 4 files from the cd to the hard drive

to install Grub, you copy a few files from the cd to the hard drive and make a text file telling Grub how to boot Puppy ... to install the Grub program, you run grub and type setup

I need to research this some more, after doing a frugal install (today) I am saving to a file in a dedicated puppy partition (which is not what I expected) I was expecting to be able to use the whole partition for puppy (not to just be able to save to a 1.25 GB file)

Note: I used the universal installer (and started from scratch) on a newly partitioned hard drive (with nothing else on it) but was never offered the option to save to a whole partition (just a file of max size 1.25 GB)

Should I have selected the 'don't save' option (when I exited and rebooted) ?

Edit: Arghhh, I wrote below post before reading the full thread (and ICPUGs answer). I'm pleased that his and my answers are compatible.

---

Bruce B wrote:

I wonder if there was a change in versions where arguments like pmedia went from UPPERCASE to lowercase?

I've seen so many examples of both text cases.

Does case matter?

--------------

Can you shed any light on this for us (me)?

This question pops up regularly on the forum, so let's address it once and for all

PMEDIA, PDEV1, PSUBDIR, LAYERFS and LOGLEVEL are environment variables for the root-level shell, that are read from the kernel line in grub's menu.lst, and that are used in the init script in initrd.gz to steer its behavior.

So, if the variable names on the kernel line are in lower case, the corresponding uppercase variables are set to the same value. The comment appears to suggest that this lowercase/uppercase translation was introduced in version 2.22 (at least for LOGLEVEL, I don't know for the other ones).

Anyway, the variables used in init are the uppercase ones. You're always safe, irrespective of exact Puppy version, when using the UPPERCASE names in the grub menu.

The init script does not translate case for the given values. The values for PMEDIA, PDEV1, and LAYERFS must always be given in lowercase. The value for PSUBDIR must always correspond in case to the name of the subdirectory._________________If it ain't broke, don't fix it. --- erikson
hp/compaq nx9030 (1.6GHz/480MB/37.2GB), ADSL, Linksys wireless router
http://www.desonville.net/
Puppy page: http://www.desonville.net/en/joere.puppy.htm

After that, Puppy saved at my next shutdown. Not sure why Puppy is not picking this up, but for those of you who are hunting it down, the other package on this Dell Latitude laptop is Ubuntu 8.04 (which is a fine distro, but it's a slow pig on this thing). As you see from above, I'm on the hda5 partition, which is the same partition as the Ubuntu. Hope this helps someone.

Instead of the usual query about saving the session, on shutdown I just get the message "session not saved".

This is when booting Puppy 4.1.2 on my desktop computer using Windows XP bootloader with grub4dos, a configuration that works fine on my laptop.
(With vmlinuz and initrd on the system hard drive, pup*.sfs on USB flash). On the desktop computer, Puppy 4.1.2 works normally when booting from a multisession CD; only when using grub4dos is there a problem. On the desktop, but not the laptop, I have a USB hard drive as well as the USB flash, but Puppy seemed to correctly find and mount the flash drive.

Any explanation or suggestions?

This is not exactly a "frugal install" as I understand it, but it is close enough to perhaps fit into this thread.

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